Shorten your feedback loop

One of the key satisfiers in the development experience is knowing the results of your actions immediately. That’s why apart from the constant aim of simplifying everything as a software developer, there can be an aim of a constant shortening the feedback loop.

A short feedback loop is a fundamental idea in some core programming practices, such as TDD.

In the perspective of frontend development, here’s what you can consider:

1. Shorten UI feedback during development.

Pay attention to the time it takes between the UI change in development mode and its reflection in the browser. Ensure you’re leveraging react-refresh and use proper webpack devtool config if you’re on this ecosystem.

2. Know how to simulate the state of the app, i.e. to stay on the same page on refresh during development.

With the growing complexity of the application, the number of states, in which this application can is growing as well. It is worth to consider a mechanism for state simulation, like make your own dev tools so you can quickly jump to a certain app state, and/or stay in it during development.

3. Know how to Deploy the application on the test environment from your local machine.

Depending on your setup, this can save you from running build or test steps on CI just to quickly check some ideas. Even better: know how to simulate the test environment locally.

4. Know how to run and scope tests locally.

Rather than waiting on CI to check if the tests are green, know how to run your unit/integration tests and scope them to certain files/suits for faster outcomes.

5. Know how to test things without redeploying the app.

Sometimes, to validate ideas, there’s no need to deploy the app on a test environment - leverage browsers’ devtools features like blocking API requests or local overrides. This way you got some answers to your questions immediately.

6. Ensure IDE assists you.

Seeing fast lint-check or type-check errors right in IDE gives you great (probably the fastest) feedback about potential problems. Make sure your lint & type-check solutions are integrated tightly with the IDE.

For a delightful developer experience, speed of ideas validation is a key player for your mental health and sometimes sets the mood for the whole day. Make “shorten your feedback loop” a motto for your setups, don’t be lazy to think about how can you validate ideas faster and enjoy your work even more.